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Month: November 2007

My beautiful Hannah! Here are some precious pictures of my little darling. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the one where she is smiling so big with her mouth open. She is my other delight and brings joy to my heart. My next post will have to be all of Elisabeth.

Well, our morning started off lovely as I made a wonderful breakfast of “Lemon Blueberry Bread” from the New Basics Cookbook by Julee Rosso & Sheila Lukins that I received from Matthew’s mother sometime last year. It was scrumptious, especially the crumb topping on it and what I loved about it the most is that it was in the oven in about 15 minutes! It was delicious with fresh butter.

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Oil a 9×5-inch loaf pan2. Stir the topping ingredients together in a small bowl until smooth. Set aside.3. In a medium-size bowl, stir the sugar, milk, butter, and egg together until smooth.4. In another bowl, toss the flour with th baking powder and salt. Stir this into the wet ingredients, and then fold in the blueberries and the lemon zest.5. Transfer the batter to the prepared loaf pan, and sprinkle with the topping. Bake until the topping is deep golden and has formed a thick crust, 50 minutes. Cook in the panfor 5 minuts, then transfer the bread to a wire rack to continue cooling.1 loafDinner was a different story. Things are a little tight this month. We could have afforded a turkey but when you add all the “other” stuff that goes with a Thanksgiving dinner, we thought it be best to do with what we have. We decided to have prime rib from our cow Brisket we had slaughtered recently. When you have a freezer full of beef, you really do have a lot to be thankful for even if you can’t afford a turkey dinner. Anyways, the day came to thaw out the prime rib. Unfortunately we found “beef rib steaks” but not a prime rib roast. Okay, we can make due with that. Let’s be grateful!

Thanksgiving day – An hour or so before we intended to eat, Matthew seared the steaks on Med-Hi heat for 1 1/2 minutes per side. He placed the steaks in the oven then on 250 degrees as recommended in Cooks Illustrated. After 30 minutes he checked the steaks with the meat thermometer. Barely any change in the temperature. So, we waited some more. After more than an hour there was a “little” change. We waited some more. After 1 1/2 hours he checked and the temperature had gone down a little (he shared with me later). After 2 + hours we decided the thermometer just wasn’t working – and it wasn’t. We sat down to a meal of mashed potatoes, salad, and one of the “toughest” cuts of meat you ever could find. Add a couple of screaming kids on top of it and there you have your Thanksgiving Dinner!

Last week we had a pretty good storm. We were out of power for 2 days and because we are on well water we were without running water as well – that’s the worst part for me! I had a few gallons of water in the back room for emergency though and we used our wood stove for cooking, heating water and coffee, etc… We did a lot of studying during those 2 days though as we are learning Biblical Greek. We’re still working on the alphabet and doing it by learning just 2 words a day.

Anyways, we tried going without the internet last month (as to find it was much more convenient to have for our banking so we’re online again), so we still have no idea as to how high the winds were out here. Matthew thinks wind gusts were 70+, I’m thinking some were closer to 100 as they seemed similar to a storm we had here 1 1/2 years ago with gusts around 100 mph.

These pictures are of some of the remnants of the storm. I wanted to get Elisabeth out of the house after being inside for 2 days so I wrapped her up in a sleeping bag so she could watch daddy saw some of the bigger branches for starter wood next year. We have our home up for sale and our power had come on here at 12:30 and we had 3 1/2 hours to get the home ready for 2 parties at 4:00 and 6:30 to look at our home. I ran around cleaning up the past mess of the last 2 days… candles, dirty dishes (no water prior to the electric coming on), and all the other extra messes you have when you don’t have power. Plus I had to get the house clean/ready just on the basics. Matthew picked up all the many, many large branches, mowed the lawns and used the blower on the leaves. We finished just in time. Now we’re just awaiting word from our agent on if the financing went through or not with one of the interested parties.